chances by Kai V. '25

There’s a clear, one-to-one correspondence between the semesters at MIT I consider “successful” and the semesters during which I accepted the most help from and collaboration with others. Freshman spring: I psetted a couple times a week, for two of my classes, with someone who became one of my closer friends here. Junior fall: I went to office hours and recitations consistently. Junior spring: I took the experimental physics capstone, which pairs you with one lab partner for the entire class, and you spend anywhere between 10 and 30 hours a week together. 01 fortunately my partner was wonderful, and the 30-hour weeks were rare

In my experience, the more common way that collaborative problem-solving happens is that one person figures out how to solve the problem and then teaches the other person. To actually solve a problem together, first you need to find a partner whose level of familiarity with the material is around the same as yours, and then it takes time to develop the deep, genuine trust needed to take a person through each step of your problem-solving process when you don’t know yet whether it’s correct. When all the factors align and you really come to a solution together, it feels like the gates to heaven are opening.

All this is to say that successful collaboration is very gratifying. You’ve heard the refrain: it’s what makes the late nights worth it! But it is also hard. It’s so much easier to try and do everything yourself, with no one else to bear witness to your failures—and to avoid having to point out the pitfalls of others. It seems like working with other people should be easy, but it requires a level of vulnerability and trust that has always felt near-impossible for me to put forth.

This goes beyond academics: junior year was so great for me in part because it was the first time I treated my UROP⁠02 Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, also used colloquially as a noun to refer to the specific research project you're working on through this program meetings as chances to clarify misunderstandings and learn how I could improve my research process, as opposed to being stressed on a weekly basis about having produced enough results for my mentor. For those unfamiliar with the structure of a UROP, here’s how it’s typically gone for me. You work under a Principal Investigator (PI)—a professor who is the head of the lab—but you interact more directly with a graduate student or postdoc who acts as your mentor, meeting with you weekly-ish to go over updates and discuss what you’ll do in the coming week. I’ve been fortunate to only have had supportive UROP experiences with people who seemed invested in my success and wellbeing.

But it still took two years during which I was basically constantly UROPing to understand that those people really wanted to help me. During my first UROP I was always having stress dreams the nights before meetings, thinking about whether I had done enough work, whether I should run a few more simulations, make a few more plots before the meeting. After a second and a third UROP, I seriously wondered whether I would ever be able to hold down a 9-to-5. I would go to the office, and just sitting in the same room as my mentor would fill me with so much anxiety—I mean, on a physical level—my hands would shake, I’d start sweating, feel dizzy, heartbeat through the roof. During the stretches over IAP or summer that I did full-time work, I arrived at the office at 7 a.m. some days or stayed until 7 p.m., worried that showing up later or leaving earlier than my mentor would reveal a fundamental, character-defining laziness. At the core of all this anxiety was the biting fear that my mentor would finally realize how stupid I was and how misguided they had been to allow me on the project.

After a year and a summer of working with my current mentor, finally this fear mostly subsided. I actively look forward to my meetings now, and actually I think the academia ivory tower really popped off when it invented one-on-one mentorship: it’s so educational and productive to have someone much more experienced than myself be so dedicated to my progress! Basically: people forgive you. People are patient. If you’re making a real effort, the right people will always give you more chances.

But sometimes it feels like I’ve missed all my chances. Somehow it took seven semesters for me to learn what’s always been espoused as the core tenet of the MIT undergraduate experience—that you can do much more working together than working alone.

You could say I’ve at least improved since freshman year, but progress is not monotonic. I started out this semester taking 6.2220, Power Electronics Laboratory. It’s a very time-consuming class that I had been really looking forward to. I loved spending time in lab, learning more about the design process, the feeling when I made a circuit work. But I was basically doing everything alone. The thought of going up and putting my name on the help queue sent roiling waves of anxiety through my stomach—instead I’d spend three hours debugging something that could have been resolved simply earlier on had I asked a TA. I didn’t know anyone else in the class and I wasn’t sure how to start talking to anyone. I’d hear everyone else working through problems together around me and wonder if it was too late to try to find some support. But my fear of being perceived as this dumb slow person would win out. Finally, mid-October, some unrelated events happened in my life that made me fall behind on the lab and I dropped the class.

I was really sad about it. I’m a senior and it’s a fall-only class, so now I’ll never be able to take it. I think this could have been avoided if I talked to, like, one person. Even though it’s really hard. You just have to do it. Things here are not really designed to be done alone, or you would be restricted to doing much simpler things.

Even more so than academics, I struggled with socializing. I had a really hard time interacting with most people I knew in my first two years here. What carried me through that time was spouting phrases that conveyed zero information, like a bad AI: “so true bestie” (this one is great because you can say it in response to literally anything), “how’s it going → well, it’s going! *comedic sounds of despair*”, “I’m sooo hosed haha” (I was almost never actually hosed when I said this one), “I only got x hours of sleep last night”, “I have a caffeine addiction”, whatever, whatever. This stream of emptiness that I fell back on because despite my desperate wild flailing I could not, for whatever reason, actually connect with people. Every interaction felt like I was watching myself interact from afar, like there was a glass wall between me and the rest of the world that I might be able to breach if only I said the right thing, and I never did.

I came to MIT being under the impression—based on how intensely the quirky/nerdy student culture is advertised⁠03 I think the experience of instant connection genuinely resonates with most people who come here, so I'm not saying any of this in a disparaging way; but for some people, instant connection or recognition doesn't happen, and that's important for incoming students to understand too —that you find a semblance of family here, people who really understand you for the first time. When this didn’t happen within a year or two (despite putting an intense and genuine effort into four clubs and two living communities) but I saw everyone around me hanging out at 3 a.m. with their New Chosen Family, well, the problem was obviously me. Shouldn’t I have been able to tap into a profound connection with others, by necessity of being at MIT together? 04 This is WRONG!! There are just some people you do not vibe with and going to MIT together doesn't change this!! You do not need to live in <em>dormitory</em> just because you fit all the usually-in-<em>dormitory</em> demographics and because everyone else on planet Earth says <em>dormitory</em> is where you should go to meet the 300 siblings you were separated at birth from!! I'm speaking from experience with one dorm, but I take this sentiment very seriously applied to <em>every</em> dorm at MIT that people make sweeping statements about the culture of. I still don’t know why it was so hard then, even with people I thought were super cool, hovering around trying to think of how to start a conversation and keep it going.

But on my third living community, finally I no longer feel like an alien species trying to mimic human interaction. I just, you know, Hang Out with people. It’s awesome. It was totally worth three years of exploration. And it wouldn’t have happened if I didn’t decide to keep being open to friendship, to keep actively trying to find people I might want to stay up until 3 a.m. chatting with, to go on spontaneous late-night trips to Harvard with.

Looking back, I wish I did a lot of things differently. Had I been insistent on working with others from the start, I could have learned a lot more about physics, and math, and electrical engineering. Maybe I would now have the confidence and experience to apply to graduate school in physics, to keep chasing a field that always ruled over my heart even when I didn’t know what in the world I wanted to use it for. And those things I might have learned are things it will be much harder to learn once I leave MIT; some of them, I’m sure, I will never learn.

And yet—when I was a smol confused freshman, my UROP mentor, who was endlessly patient and wise and whom I was nevertheless intimidated as hell by, taught me emacs and Linux and the entire mindset I use to think about research problems now. As a sophomore, all those clubs I joined and dropped out of showed me what I didn’t want to pursue in the future. As a junior—well, no notes, 10/10 year. And as a senior, I realize—long overdue—that there are plenty of people at MIT for me to find profound, deep connections with, or just to laugh at memes with.

So here is what I learned, floundering around feeling alone, even if I missed out on some physics and math in the process. That you should keep trying, again and again, that even when connection feels elusive, at the end of the day it’s the only thing you have, and that alone makes it worth the effort. That people really want to help you, and you should let them. People who are experienced and passionate and kind—and there are a lot of those kinds of people here—will always give you more chances than you think, more chances even than you might give yourself.